In a drear-nighted December, About the frozen time. Ah! would 't were so with many Writh'd not at passèd joy? WRITTEN IN DISGUST OF VULGAR SUPERSTITION THE church bells toll a melancholy round, In some black spell; seeing that each one tears SONNET HAPPY is England! I could be content For skies Italian, and an inward groan To sit upon an Alp as on a throne, And half forget what world or worldling meant. Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging: Yet do I often warmly burn to see Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their sing ing, And float with them about the summer waters. ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET THE poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's - he takes the lead In summer luxury, he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. SONNET AFTER dark vapours have oppress'd our plains Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May; suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves, Sweet Sappho's cheek, a sleeping infant's breath, The gradual sand that through an hour-glass WRITTEN ON THE BLANK SPACE AT THE END OF CHAUCER'S TALE OF 'THE FLOURE AND THE LEFE' THIS pleasant tale is like a little copse: Come cool and suddenly against his face, Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES My spirit is too weak-mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Bring round the heart an indescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude TO HAYDON (WITH THE PRECEDING SONNET) HAYDON! forgive me that I cannot speak Forgive me, that I have not Eagle's wings- Think too, that all those numbers should be thine; hem? For when men star'd at what was most divine Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them. TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ. [A DEDICATION] GLORY and loveliness have pass'd away; gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please ON THE SEA It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 't is in such gentle temper found, That scarcely will the very smallest shell Be mov'd for days from where it sometime fell, When last the winds of Heaven were unbound. O ye! who have your eyeballs vex'd and tir'd, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; O ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody, · Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired! |